{"id":1333,"date":"2009-11-20T07:40:00","date_gmt":"2009-11-20T11:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2009\/11\/20\/is-the-north-country-conservative\/"},"modified":"2009-11-20T07:40:00","modified_gmt":"2009-11-20T11:40:00","slug":"is-the-north-country-conservative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2009\/11\/20\/is-the-north-country-conservative\/","title":{"rendered":"Is the North Country conservative?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been picking over the close-to-final ballot numbers compiled by Jude Seymour for the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.watertowndailytimes.com\/section\/blogs09\">Watertown Daily Times<\/a> coverage of the NY-23 special election.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s a startling discovery.  In the region known traditionally as the North Country, Conservative Doug Hoffman got creamed.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s the breakdown.<\/p>\n<p>Doug Hoffman won four North Country counties (Fulton, Hamilton, Jefferson and Lewis) by a total of 1,733 votes.  In no case did he win a county in this region by more than 600 votes.<\/p>\n<p>Bill Owens also won four North Country counties (Clinton, Essex, Franklin and St. Lawrence) by a total of 8,318 votes.  He won two counties &#8212; Clinton and St. Lawrence &#8212; by more than 3,000 votes.<\/p>\n<p>The bottom line?  Even if all of Dede Scozzafava&#8217;s North Country votes are placed in Hoffman&#8217;s column, Owens still wins this region.<\/p>\n<p>The Conservative came darn close to prevailing because he ran up very strong vote totals in central New York, where none of the three candidates were well known.<\/p>\n<p>These numbers certainly re-enforce the GOP&#8217;s initial instinct, that the best fit for a win here was a moderate like Republican Dede Scozzafava.<\/p>\n<p>If the North Country is staunchly conservative (in the sense that Doug Hoffman suggested) how come a  Conservative was beaten straight up in this region by a Democrat?<\/p>\n<p>Your thoughts welcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been picking over the close-to-final ballot numbers compiled by Jude Seymour for the Watertown [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1333"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1333"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1333\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}